Halloween 2012

I was invited to a Halloween party held by a colleague this year and this allows me to indulge my love of fancy dress that appears to have developed in adulthood.

I had an idea for a two-tone approach of a black and white based around a suit, white facepaint and contacts. This did mean that I had to remove all of my hair, however, since it didn't comply with the colour scheme.

Quite pleased with the end result since there were a lot of unknowns (never used contacts, glued on prosthetics or shaved my head before) but the whole outfit only cost me £7 since I just had to buy the glue and the contacts, the rest of the outfit being recycled from previous work events.

D600 revisited

I've continued to follow the D600 after its ridiculously pricy UK launch and, at time of writing, it's come down in price 21% on Amazon to a much more reasonable £1540. This puts it much more within my price range for what I'd be prepared to pay for a camera at this level, i.e. entry-level full-frame, but there was one more disappointment when we had the release announcement which is that it only does three-stage Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). For those you who aren't aware, AEB makes HDR photography (which I do a lot of) very easy- I switch it on, hold down my shutter release and my camera will take three photos at varying levels of exposure for my HDR software to combine.

...and that's my point, this is what I do with my current camera, a D7000, and the D600 doesn't give me any more exposures. The D800 will let you do up to seven so I was hoping for at least five from a camera that costs twice as much as my 'humble' D7000.

Or so I thought, but then reading about how the D600's sensor already has a superior dynamic range and so each of those three exposures is still delivering more from an HDR perspective. Just how much more is a bit more difficult to quantify.

I also realised that, in order to get the benefit of the new camera, I'd also have to replace all my DX (cropped) format lenses so I'd be looking at at least a £3000 spend in total.

Maybe not something I'll be doing too soon, then...